Warning: Spoilers!

The Usual Suspects is an excellent film, correctly celebrated for its non-linear structure and unreliable narrator. But it’s also a fascinating look at male anxiety in the way the characters are consistently calling into question each others’ sexuality and masculinity. As the Suspects themselves jockey to out-man each other Verbal Kint/Keyser Soze looks on showing the virtue of thought and ambiguity amid the cock-fights. It’s an anxiety that seems increasingly pervasive in male-culture, finding angry expression in communities such as Red Pill or in humorous social comment in #masculinitysofragile?. It’s with great prescience that Chris McQuarrie’s script for The Usual Suspects explores this.

Throughout the film the threat of loss of masculinity is ever present, with the possibility of passivity (especially in the sense of sexual penetration) seen as the greatest fear. Not so much death for McManus, Hockney, Fenster and Keaton but buggery as the ultimate humiliation. Their strength is seen in terms of this, their unwillingness to “bend over for anybody” in Kint’s terms. They tease and threaten each other with penetration (Fenster to Hockney “Hey lover boy, you wanna piece?”, McManus to Hockney “You wanna dance with a man for a change?”) When Keaton is arrested he’s told he’s not a business man, “From now on, you’re in the gettin’-fucked-by-us business.” Bending over, being fucked is the greatest threat. Is it any wonder these men grip their guns so tightly throughout the film? This constant reassurance of their masculinity, the acceptable cinematic phallus helps define, and protect them

Except that it doesn’t. They are all undone by the most passive one of them all. One who talks rather than acts, who hurts and plans. Is it any coincidence that Verbal states that “I’ll probably shit blood tonight” having been punched by Keaton, revealing his own penetrability (unsurprisingly anal). Agent Kujan tries to dominate him mentally and physically, but its his own status as a “cripple” and a “gimp” (which means both disabled and a sexual submissive) that give him an advantage. It’s beyond these men, and their physical anxiety, to understand that they can be controlled by talk, not physicality, that passivity can be controlling.

Fundamentally this is the fear of the feminine (passive, talking, penetrated) that has taken root in our culture since the Victorian era – it’s created a binary opposition where attitudes and qualities accrue on either side and slippage isn’t possible. It’s beyond anyone in the film to see that Verbal Kint could move across boundaries, have qualities from either groups. It’s a division especially riven into US culture from the Western in which masculinity is held superior for its silence, action and ruggedness, with women connected to the home and hearth but also the emasculating forces of civilization.

Oddly it reminds of the classical split between Rome and Greece, and the USA is often compared to Rome. The Greeks had Odysseus praised for his wiles and planning, his cunning and speech. For the Romans he became Ulysses a treacherous man, whose deceit was an un-Roman quality. It may not be un-linked that the Greeks were more interested in sex between men. We don’t know whether Alexander the Great was a top, but it’s clear in the Illiad that Achilles was a bottom.

Classical diversions aside The Usual Suspects suggests the current growing anxiety in some men about their gender – that any quality that aligns them with women/homosexuality is to be driven away. Ironically, this leads to their downfall. Turns out their masculinity is fragile, rather like a Kobayashi mug.

The November Man is overall a silly film, a later entry into the Liam Neeson/Taken inspired Geri-Action series. This time Pierce Brosnan dusts off his suits and gets to play a retired spy dragged out of retirement, etc. Nothing special, but a reasonably well put together film (despite Brosnan’s rather alarming action-gurn). What is of note, and what really got my back up, was the insistence, in such a throw-away film, to depict a rape against the main female character (played by Olga Kurylenko, another Bond alumnus who plays a very similar character in Quantum of Solace). I don’t actually mind the fact that her character is raped – it makes sense – but what got to me was the insistence on seeing it – in POV. Not much mind, but enough. And it got me thinking. Why isn’t it enough for us to know she was raped? Why then later does this character have to suffer a flash back that leaves her useless and unable to avenge herself (you know – so the guys can do the killing)? Why does her whole character have to be defined this way?

Now The November Man is throw away, I doubt we’ll care about it in 5 minutes. But we will care about the preponderance of women being raped in film, and the consistent use of rape as the way to torture, threaten, and emotionally scare women. Once again women’s sexual “virtue” becomes a dominant aspect of their character. How they react, how they’re scarred, how they recover becomes part of the continuing moral grading of women based on sexual morality (and how men have to come in and deal with it). The woman is inevitably passed from one man (bad) to another (good) – although both are violent and murder others. But hey I guess that’s just how men express love, and hate, and maybe hunger. By shooting people.

Does any of this matter and what does it have to do with refrigerators? Women in Refrigerators is a website set up in 1999 to catalogue the various atrocities that happen to female characters in comics, started after a Green Lantern found his dead girlfriend in the aforesaid white good. And it’s an extensive list in which women are transformed from people to motivating factors, and of course the worse their death/rape/mutilation the greater the cathartic violence the hero gets to enact. This at a time when Hollywood is becoming more and more male-centered (check out this Variety report). Maybe we need a Hollywood Women in Refrigerators? I think, however, that it would be so extensive so as to break the internet.

As long as we keep seeing women in terms of sexual virtue, in which their whole lives are defined by a sexual trauma that can only be redeemed by a “good” man we’re going to keep having wider social issues concerning real relations between men and women. As men we need to start objecting when women are reduced to this. And we need to start recognizing how it also de-humanizes us – in which we are reduced to vengeance machines carrying massive anxiety about sex and sexuality. Frankly it’s not very grown up.

In 1974 Laura Mulvey published her ideas on the male gaze, suggesting that Classical Hollywood reduces women to passive objects simultaneously desired and hated by a ‘male’ camera. Although Mulvey’s ideas are not perfect, and are deeply rooted in Oedipal silliness, her idea got traction because she was on to something important that overall women are being used for plot motivation, from which male characters act out the male audience’s anxieties. Indeed, these days, women barely feature in Hollywood films (only 30% of speaking characters). Lots has been said about the harm this does to women. And quite right. But we should also consider the harm it does to men, in limiting our ideas about women. They become problems, not people. And if that’s all we see it becomes real. Picking on one representation is neither here nor there and The November Man doesn’t matter. But women, and men, do.

O Canada! Such a civilized and cultured place. As someone once told me it’s America, run by the Swiss. And yet beneath that genial Canuck exterior lurks a dark underbelly that produced David Cronenberg, James Cameron, and Atom Egoyan. And now comes Lowell Dean a man who thinks the best way to depict a werewolf transformation is to begin with the penis. Genius.

Wolfcop is not the best film ever, but I’m glad it exists. At a brisk 79 minutes it flies by following its loser protagonist Lou Garou (Leo Fafard) as he wakes one morning with vague memories of a black magic ritual. As he turns from Cop to Wolfcop a lot of fun is had, especially as it turns Lou from a very poor police officer to a very effective lycanthropic defender of law and order (if a little violent. If tearing of someone’s face is considered violent. Which it is. Even in Canada). The whole film plays as a homage to classic campy 80s horror (thing The Howling & Vamp), and is maybe a little too self-aware at times, but generally it takes its ludicrous premise to the right extremes including the best human/werewolf sex scene you’ll see this year. All to a bespoke synth soundtrack.

I wish it had a little more money for the finale, but up till then it’s great and includes some wonderful practical effects answering questions such as “What happens to the human skin a werewolf sheds?” and “What would an alcoholic werewolf be like?” Finally we know. Wolfcop 2 has been announced. Well done Canada.

This is a fun little B horror, enjoying the culturally ingrained fetishisms that surround the healthcare profession and stirring in its own happy brand of weird. The film follows Abby (Paz de la Huerta) who narrates the film in a Kill Bill style as she persues her quest to punish men that she judges are letting down their wives and families. Her murderous honey-trap develops however when she mentors new nurse Danni (Katrina Bowden), and develops a dangerous obsession.

A proper exploitation film full of nudity and violence Nurse is good fun if you don’t think too hard about it. Well shot and at times quite inventive it builds its elements of body horror steadily until a Hospital becomes covered in blood. Abby is a nice addition to the slasher villain roll-call, which really has too few women on it. I couldn’t quite decide if Paz de la Huerta’s performance was eccentric or just plain bad, but it was always entertaining and the film builds to a fun if decidedly OTT finale. Katrina Bowden does a good line in not-so-defenseless damsel and Judd Nelson (of the 1980s!) provides good support, with Kathleen Turner in a quick cameo (that voice is still to die for). Could do without the CGI blood – whatever happened to condoms filled with corn-syrup? – but for an hour and a half of cheap thrills you can’t go too wrong with this.

In June 1985 flight TWA 847 was hijacked by Islamic extremists after taking off from Athens. A tense drama unfolded, in which the hijackers segregated all the passengers with Jewish sounding names, beat others and eventually killed Robert Stetham a USA Navy Diver. His body was dumped onto the tarmac of Beirut International Airport. A complex situation developed with the plane being shunted between airports in Beirut and Algiers with some hostages being released and the Jewish ones being taken off the plane and held hostage in Beirut. Eventually after extensive negotiations between the terrorists and the Reagan administration the passengers were released. It’s a fascinating and scary story that would no doubt make a great film. The Delta Force is not that film. The Delta Force is Cannon Film, directed by its joint head honcho, and therefore decides to take this incredible true story and stitch it Frankenstein like to a Chuck Norris movie. Its not one of his better ones (relatively speaking). It’s also Lee Marvin’s last film. It’s very far from one of his better ones.

Chuck plays Scott McCoy who has abandoned the Special Forces in the first few minutes of the film because those damn democratically elected ass-holes in Washington are getting in the way of him doing his job. Then the film turns into a hostage drama which appears to have been made by people who took Airplane! seriously. A litany of disaster movie veterans appear (Robert Vaughan, Shelley Winters, and George Fucking Kennedy) as a blacked up Robert Forster scowls and threatens with his moustache. Occasionally an interesting film pokes its nose out, a film that might peer into the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, acknowledging that everyone in these types of story is a loser. Then Golan’s instincts cut in and it’s the annoying kid and her Cabbage Patch Doll, the heavy handing references to the Nazi work Camps or it’s Chuck, hair flowing like a rampant Lion’s mane, sat astride a motorbike that has twin rocket launches – Fuck Yeah! Because it’s not part of the true story Golan has to shoe horn in his action film to the real-life hostage drama (and believe me, bits of the film are straight out of the real events) creating a horribly uneven tone that at one points begs to be taken seriously, then asks you to watch as Chuck rides his bike through a window and into Forster. All the while Alan Silvestri pounds out a score that sounds oddly like the soundtrack to Hot Shots! It’s an awful way to use a real-life event to power a film; utterly exploitative trash. United 93 demonstrates how to do this sort of thing well and avoid the smell of money being made over real people’s deaths. What’s worse it’s often boring. Unless you like Chuck’s hair and beard combo. He such a real man. You can tell because he eats his scrambled eggs while stood up. Chuch don’t have time to sit.

Academic conferences can be a bit of a mixed bag. There’s the focus (does it have one), the speakers and, perhaps most importantly, the coffee. Well DMU, and in particular IQ Hunter, excelled themselves with the Jaws Symposium. By focusing on one film it ensured that the papers were relevant and that each panel made sense in itself, as well as for the wider day. It’s difficult, and unfair, to pick out specific speakers but I will mention that both key notes (Murray Pomerance and Nigel Morris) were very good and that a whole host of new ideas were thrown about – including some excellent myth busting about the film. Yes it’s important – but not always for the reasons we’re told in the text books. The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the Skype chat with Carl Gottlieb who gave some great background on the film and laid to rest a few more lingering myths, chiefly the idea that John Milius wrote the Indianapolis speech (he didn’t – it was a combination of Gottlieb, Howard Sackler and Quint himself, Robert Shaw). He also, graciously, answered my query about whether being on the opposite sea-board to Hollywood allowed the film-makers an extra freedom (and the ability to get away with all the problems the production is famous for) – the simple answer was yes.

We heard about Jaws’ place in cinema history, the epiphenomena surrounding the film, links to childhood and sexuality, ideas on the masochistic process of cinema and much more. Also lunch was good. And it’s always great to hear Peter Kramer’s laugh. See you in another 40.

On hearing of the death of Christopher Lee, at the ripe old age of 92, I’m both saddened at his loss, but overwhelmingly grateful for his contribution to film; he seems almost written across my film-history being part of many beloved films from the independent and weird to gigantic Hollywood productions. His films were not always great, but he was always great in them. Look no further than Star Wars Episode II. For the most part a terrible, terrible film. But then Lee looms across the screen and, taking from Harrison Ford’s famous quote, he can say that shit.

Personally I’ll remember him for two roles that I loved from childhood: Scaramanga & Rochefort. In both he displays the avuncular charm we all expected, but he also conveyed a cruel charm in The Man With the Golden Gun and an often overlooked talent in comedy in The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers. There are so many other greats the obvious (Dracula, The Wicker Man, Lord of the Rings) and maybe not so obvious (The Devil Rides Out) and the oddly compelling (The Return of Captain Invincible in which many of us first heard his rather good baritone). The 1980s weren’t the greatest decade after the heights of the 1960s & 70s, but the love he inspired in film-makers as diverse as Joe Dante, Tim Burton and Peter Jackson let us realize just how good he was in the 90s and later. He conveyed a level of gravitas that’s rare in an actor, belaying his origins at Rank’s Charm-school.

Apparently he appeared in more films than anyone else in the history of cinema, many of them with his equal Peter Cushing. Some were terrible. Some were amazing. He was always brilliant (and yes I include Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow in this).

All this nostalgia for Cannon Film (read here) got me excited to watch a Chuck Norris action spectacular. And what could be more spectacular than the film Cannon gave a black tie premier for (in their car-park)? Damn straight. Pull on your Chuck Norris Action Jeans (only $19.95 at your nearest hairy chested true ‘Merican retailer) and sit through the car-crash of Invasion USA, $12 million worth of kicking, shooting, punching, Chuck Norris fury. Watch as Terrorists invade ‘Merica with a plan to sow disruption and chaos through their violent acts and cunning disguises, and their indeterminate ethnicities (perhaps they’re from Terrorania?). Stare in awe as Chuck squints through one hour and 47 minutes of disjointed story full of those classic 80s action cliches you know and love: Spunky lady reporter! Titty bar! Pimps! Unnecessary killing of random innocents! A Hero dragged out of retirement for ONE LAST JOB!

Even my willingness to see the best of any old tripe was sorely tested by this one. Ironically it’s not that badly made; the action is serviceable, which is the main point. It’s just that everything is so generic, it tries so hard and it’s edited to a snail’s pace. Norris doesn’t help, he appears to have two expressions; squinty and chewing gum. He plays Matt Hunter who once worked for THE AGENCY and rues the day he let villain Rostov live (when he isn’t mud-wrestling ‘gators). He lives off grid, so only THE AGENCY and international terrorists can find him. Norris displays a spider-sense throughout the film – knowing instinctively when the bad guys are going to kill a bus load of white kids, or destroy a church, full of white people. Not around when the Latin-Americans get whacked, mind.

The bad guys’ plot is underdeveloped and lacks sense, but there is some glee to be wrought from their destruction of ‘Merican suburbs and malls (and at Christmas, the Bastards!) Despite their cunning disguises you can tell them a mile away – in the mall they make the mistake of stealing a Nissan Truck. Should have stole ‘Merican. Drug dealing is thrown in, along with a ludicrous amount of guns, including Norris’ Double Uzi Brassiere – a weapon so awesome no-one has ever dared wear it again. Only one line shines through; “If you come back in, I’ll hit you with so many rights you’ll be begging for a left”. No wonder the company went bust.

For those of us of a certain age, raised in the aisles of the local video shop staring up in wonder at the hand-painted VHS covers (so much better than photoshop) Cannon films has some fond memories. Bought in 1979 out of a lust to conquer America from Israels two biggest film-makers (Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan), Cannon had previously existed as a B-Movie specialist with one break-out hit to their name, the excellent Joe (John G Avildsen, 1970). But Globus and Golan had big dreams, and even bigger delusions. The figured that if they pre-sold the rights to their movies (which they were very good at) they could finance them and later films. It was a business model that worked really well, for a while, until they got over-ambitious and dissolved owing a lot of people a lot of money.

The whole fantastic story is well told in Hartley’s documentary, that makes good watching for any child of the 80s, or anyone who want to know how the film industry works (or often doesn’t). That Cannon, for a while, seriously shook up the majors shows the power of product, but their over ambition and hubris demonstrates how not to sustain a film-business. Their impact is amazing in many ways – helping to refine the modern action film, exploiting the power of film-franchises and creating the original mock-busters. I can remember fondly many of their films – some that I’ve revisited later realizing how undemanding we must have been back then. They gave us Chuck Norris & Jean-Claude Van Damme, kept Charles Bronson in work, helped the UK sustain film-production, recognized the importance of foreign sales and every now and then helped to create some weird and wonderful pictures. Films such as the bat-shit crazy Lifeforce, the wonderful Company of Wolves and the experimental documentary Powaqqatsi; they financed films from such film-makers as Jean-Luc Godard and Franco Zeferelli, letting them do what they liked to create serious art. But I’ll remember them for those hours I spent staring at Masters of the Universe, King Solomon’s Mines, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Appointment with Death… In many ways all terrible films. But good god I had fun.

This is a wonderful, fun, grown up film about sex, desire and what is (or isn’t) considered normal. On its release it gained some notoriety for the explicit sexual acts on display – but this is not hardcore pornography (no matter what Chris Tookey of the Daily Mail thinks). Rather it’s a sweet exploration of one woman’s sexual frustration, and an acknowledgement that trust, openness, and self-knowledge are required for sexual fulfillment. Sure it may be idealized to an extent (mostly avoiding questions of STDs, etc) but it presents itself in an overtly playful manner (opening and closing with a cardboard model of New York). At times it’s very funny. When Hollywood struggles to represent anything vaguely grown-up about sex (and sometimes alarmingly placing sexual desire and objectification onto younger women – check out this Honest Trailer for Transformers 4) and women in their 30s are too old for men in their 50s (even when the woman is the wonderful Maggie Gyllenhaal) any film that challenges this is welcome. They’re especially welcome when they are this much fun.

I wouldn’t suggest you watch it with your mother though. Or if you’re homophobic, transphobic, ageist, rascist or thinking that the gay marriage vote in Ireland is the worst thing to happen in the last 100 years.